Sexual hysteria and interior design

“Insanity,” cackles Heath Ledger at the highest point of tension in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, “is like gravity—all it takes is a little push.”¹ In much the same way, women repressed in thought and action in Victorian societies have been skirting the edge of that particular psychological chasm their entire lives. The systematic subjugation of women over the course of centuries spawned a host of supposedly-hysterical women unable to cope with the bottling up of their humanity, driving them to the brink of rationality and, in at least two fictional cases, over the edge. In both James’ The Turn of the Screw and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, our protagonists’ struggles parallel one another in a multiplicity of ways. While the governess quashes her lustful feelings to sate her superego and the anonymous author of Wallpaper’s epistles is subjected by her husband to torturous isolation in the interest of behavioral control and eliminating her unacknowledged postpartum depression, both are squirming under pressures and moulds placed on them by androcentric power structures. And in the end, both characters fall victim to what their contemporaries would label “hysteria” due to their societal repression, and each woman’s deteriorating sanity is made manifest in similar spectral scapegoats representative of their psychological ids.

This biased thinking extended even into the realm of medicine, and belittlement of symptoms exhibited by females brought forth a host of “ailments” invented by male physicians to explain away certain irregularities of their maligned psyches, to attribute their profound depression and “other diseases […] in the way of aches and feebleness” to an imbalance of humours or similar pseudoscientific pish-posh (142)². As clarified in Bauer’s footnote, the protagonist’s mention of her “hysterical tendency” was indicative of the times: “In the nineteenth century, women’s illnesses of all sorts were generally characterized as “hysteria,” although the symptoms might range from pain to anxiety, fatigue to depression” (42)³. Because of their ignorance or, perhaps, their apathy, there existed a great number of true psychological distresses that went ignored, undiagnosed, or untreated by the medical establishment at the time. Like the narrator’s husband John in The Yellow Wallpaper who “does not know how much [she] really suffer[s and] knows there is no reason to suffer, [which] satisfies him” (44)³, men of these sciences were largely dismissive of issues of the mental state—maybe not exclusively, but especially—in women. This was obviously a frustration for Gilman’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, whose questionably-intentioned spouse chooses to treat her supposed hysteria with forced isolation in a variation of contemporary neurologist S. Weir Mitchell’s “rest treatment,”⁴ a decision which will eventually spell the unwinding of his wife’s sanity.

Coupled with the perfunctory attention often paid their mental state was the fact that human sexuality in a broad sense was imagined away, and an open discussion about even the lack of open discussion was entirely taboo. This sort of lopsided societal pressure generated in women a sense of discomfort at the gap between society’s expectations and the reality of natural sexuality, and this disconnect could result in “sexual hysteria,” defined by Renner as “a profound conflict between [woman’s] natural sexual impulses and the repression of sexuality required by society and exaggerated by Victorian idealism” (274)⁵. It should be mentioned forthright that this hysteria would not be exclusive to women, but that psychological crises of this sort are evidenced only in women because of the degree of their repression in Victorian society relative to women in other—even earlier—time periods and even their male contemporaries. This hysteria would manifest itself in outward uprightness and subsurface sexual preoccupations, and by this reading it stands to reason that there is no supernatural element to the experiences in James’ The Turn of the Screw at all, but rather a series of sexual projections of the governess’ repressed and unacknowledged sexual urges—a frustration that becomes murderous at the novella’s climax.

The apparition of Peter Quint which—who?—routinely appears to the governess represents her own distorted understanding of human sexuality, an understanding forged in the chaotic furnace of societal pressures and repression. He is framed on more than one occasion in sexual terms, from the governess’ first description of his physicality to Mrs. Grose, which includes an extended rundown of his features and several complimentary word choices not limited to being “remarkably [handsome]” (48)⁶, and as being a “hound” in his relations with the other apparition to appear, Miss Jessel (58)⁶. Renner argues in his “Red hair, very red, close curling” essay that Quint represents the archetypical sexual villain, a red-haired devil without “scruples against ‘taking advantage of the susceptibility which women exhibit in the presence of good-looking men’” (277)⁵ and who, according to Mrs. Grose, could “[do] what he wished […] [w]ith them all” (58)⁶. He is representative not only of the governess’ repressed sexual urges and taboo attractions to men, but more broadly of her treatment of sexuality in general: it being a forbidden, mysterious and dangerous temptation that eventually haunts and pesters her to the brink of insanity—and then over the edge. Both apparitions are projections of her psychological id, her uninhibited sexual urges which have been silenced and repressed into their hidden, secret niche within the inner workings of her psyche. The superego in this case has so supplanted her other psychological identities that she is no longer able to function at peak capacity; her world devolves into panic and insanity—sexual hysteria from a Freudian perspective.

Similarly, the quarantined heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper projects her psychological unease on the imaginary, beginning with her suspicions about the wallpaper lining her room. At the outset, she merely personifies the “flamboyant pattern” (43)³ in ways marginally excessive for a presumably sane patient, mentioning its knowledge of its “vicious influence” and “absurd unblinking eyes” which surround her. She even mentions her surprise at finding “so much expression in an inanimate thing” (44)³, but her obsession and hallucinations worsen as the story progresses. Before long she begins encountering “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (50)³ and eventually knows of a score of them, a clan of “so many of those creeping women” of which she herself might be member (58)³. The women, much like her predicament, seem to be confined by the wallpaper that insulates her prison-like room and are therefore representative of her confinement, both physically in the bedroom and metaphorically within her society. These are manifestations of the Gilman-character’s psychological ego as held captive by the projection of her superego in the wallpaper, a conflict after which her identity has been compromised and all that remains is her irrational, delusional, “creeping” id.

Interestingly, another parallel in both novellas is both heroines’ insistence that the people around them are consciously complicit in whatever supernatural happenings they perceive. Throughout The Turn of the Screw the governess accuses the children of an awareness of the ghosts she sees, constantly pressing them on the issue and assuming even their silence is indicative of a conspiracy. This sort of thinking is even more evident in The Yellow Wallpaper, wherein the protagonist witnesses her husband “looking at the paper” and has “caught Jennie with her hand on it once” (52)³. This paranoia eventually turns the narrator against her “captors,” and she refuses to leave the wallpapered room or heed their biddings, preferring instead to “creep smoothly on the floor” (58)³ and make great efforts to help her newfound friend—or, rather, her newfound projection of self—escape the yellow restraints which bind her. These examples of conspiratorial thinking in both characters are the harbingers to a destructive and violent turn both psychological cases take at their respective climaxes.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, the heroine’s stream of consciousness devolves into a psychotic logic predicating a complete mental breakdown as she begins deconstructing the possessive wallpaper and “gnawing” at her bedstead (57)³. Her delusion is that John and Jennie intend to imprison her in the sickening wallpaper, a fantasy of which they only become aware when she tells them, “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you […] And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (58)³ At this point, the Gilman-character and her hallucinatory companion have become one, and perhaps due to the realization of the scope of his wife’s insanity, perhaps due to his acknowledgement of responsibility thereof, or perhaps still due to his own mental frailty, shortly thereafter John faints and collapses to the floor. The novella closes with the protagonist hovering, “creeping” over his limp form, a visage representative of her decisive moral victory over her husband and his system of thought, a victory whose only casualty was her sanity. This notion of “rest treatment”—a therapeutic isolation aimed at curbing undesirable behaviors in the women of the age—is a failed one, says Gilman.

Following a similar sort of imagery, at the climax of The Turn of the Screw the governess’ sexual anxiety and panic reach a fever pitch. Quint, the manifestation of her perception of sexuality, appears again outside the window of the room she and Miles have been conversing in. Miles is unaware of the looming specter, much like he is at this point fully unaware of the coming onset of puberty for him. The inclusion of a boy of Miles’ age was a deliberate one, as he is approaching the twilight of his innocence and is about to discover his own sexual identity, an identity of the exact sort the governess struggles with in herself. In an effort to protect young Miles from “the hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation” (119)⁶, to shield him from the reality of human sexuality society has made her so fearful of—the aforementioned “woe”—the governess pounces on young Miles and in the process of shielding his eyes and mind quite literally smothers the boy to death. Interpretations of Quint as child molester could be adapted to understand sexual awareness as the molester, for just as pedophiles are thieves of the innocence of children, so too does the onset of puberty and the beginnings of sexuality rob once-pure young men and women of their ignorance of adult matters such as these. The governess, consciously or otherwise, wishes to spare Miles the anxiety and frustration she herself suffers, and in her attempts to prevent his loss of innocence ends up murdering him. Now he’ll never have the opportunity—or, from the governess’ perspective, the challenge—to resolve his own sexual identity for himself. Whereas Peter Quint and puberty threatened to rob young Miles of his innocence, the governess robs him of experiencing the crisis she herself could never reconcile.

The experiences of both heroines, while certainly not commonplace, were emblematic of psychological conflicts suffered by the compromised women of this age. Subject to countless societal pressures and the whims of males in control, these women often had great difficulty reconciling their own self-images, their egos, with the expectations set forth by the ruling gender, encompassed in their superegos. In at least these two literary instances, the conflict is ultimately a destructive one wherein the women’s “hysterical tendencies” manifested themselves in apparitions—by which they were both ultimately consumed. Both the governess and the Gilman-based protagonist took their respective leaves from the realm of sanity with outbursts of violence and paranoia, refocusing their frustrations away from the problems causing them—represented by either Peter Quint or a woman lurking behind the pattern of hideous wallpaper—and releasing their fury onto those yet sane people around them. While it’d be remiss and slightly hypocritical to simply diagnose both women with forms of “hysteria,” there is something to be said for the similarities in experience of these two characters—perhaps society pushed them over the edge and into the same chasm.